Filmmaker Tim Mahoney’s The Exodus Conspiracy, due to be released within a few months, seeks to demonstrate the historical accuracy of the Biblical narrative of the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt on the basis of recent archaeological discoveries and geographic explorations. A secondary thesis of the film is that the “Red Sea” crossed by the Israelites was the Gulf of Aquaba (called the Gulf of Eilat by modern-day Israelis), rather than “Sea of Reeds” in Egypt, as most Biblical scholars have always assumed, and that the true “Mount Sinai” or “Mount Horeb” of the Exodus narrative is in northern Saudi Arabia, and is not the Mt. Sinai shown to pilgrims and tourists over the centuries in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

At the same time, the film also documents the efforts of Arab governments, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to suppress, or at least to seriously impede, the discovery and publication of archaeological data that would confirm the historicity of the Biblical narrative.

The Jihad against the Jews and Christians has many facets, including the rewriting of history and anthropology. As they say, read it all.

Sirhan was not simply a “Jordanian citizen”, as he was called at the time. He was an embittered Palestinian who had been born in 1944 to a Christian family in Jerusalem. During the war that broke out when he was four years old, Jewish insurgents seized his house, and his family was forced to flee. He was nearly killed in an Irgun bombing at the Damascus Gate, and witnessed other violent attacks that deeply traumatised him.

As a young refugee, Sirhan attended a school where teachers exhorted students to struggle for Palestinian rights. Later his family moved to California, and he was there when Israel seized East Jerusalem and other Arab territories in the Six-Day War of 1967. He told at a friend that he believed Fatah was justified in using terror to oppose Israeli rule.

During the 1968 presidential campaign, Sirhan came to identify Robert Kennedy, who he had originally supported, as a friend of Israel. Three weeks before committing his crime, he watched a documentary about Kennedy’s involvement with Israel on CBS television. Soon afterward he heard a radio tape of Kennedy telling an audience at a Los Angeles synagogue that he would maintain “clear and compelling” support for Israel. After hearing it, a relative later testified, Sirhan ran from the room with “his hands on his ears, and almost weeping”.

Sirhan timed his attack on Kennedy to coincide with the first anniversary of the opening of the Six-Day War. At his trial, he sought several times to place his crime in the Palestinian context. “When you move a whole country, a whole people, bodily from their own homes, from their land, from their business,” he said, “that is completely wrong … . That burned the hell out of me.” Few Americans had any idea what he was talking about.

Kinzer concludes that Sirhan Sirhan’s murder of Bobby Kennedy was the first blowback against America from the Israeli occupation of Palestine. He places the cause of the murder directly at the feet of America’s and RFK’s support for Israel. But what he mentions, yet ignores in his conclusion, is the part that Palestian propaganda had to play in it.

Review this.

When news of Sirhan’s background was flashed back to the Arab world after he killed Kennedy, many people there instinctively understood what had happened. They recognised the crime as a horrific expression of the violent frustration that young Palestinians were beginning to feel. […]

and this.

As a young refugee, Sirhan attended a school where teachers exhorted students to struggle for Palestinian rights.

Though Kinzer doesn’t say it, the English word “struggle” is often substituted for the Arabic word “jihad.” Even though a Sirhan Sirhan was raised a Maronite christian definitely taught to wage jihad Palestinians have been teaching their children to hate and desire to kill Jews for 50 years now. Is it any wonder that the first generation of Palestinians in exile should have been infected by the Judenhass? They were affected by the war, and all wars are overwhelming, shattering, horrible experiences. Civilians caught up in war are understandably traumatized by them and their resulting prejudices and hatreds are understandable. But the hatred of Palestinians for Jews and Americans is something else. It is a sore spot intentionally rubbed raw and self-infected with poison. Because of that, it cannot be blamed on anyone other than the Palestinians themselves.

Israpundit teaches a good vocabulary lesson concerning Israel that I’ve paraphrased. Read his for more.

The West Bank should more properly be called Judea and Samaria, as those are the traditional names of the areas. The West Bank was a name that was imposed by the King of Jordan after his 1948 seizure of the areas.

The concept that Judea, which even has the word Jew for its
first syllable, doesn’t have anything to do with Jews is laughable. And
Samaria, is that named for Philistines or Samarites?

Palestine is a Roman variant for the Philistines, who were an ancient people who were hostile to the Jews who lived in Judea and Samaria in Biblical times. Palestine was the name the Romans imposed when they scattered the Jews out of Judea, leaving only the early Christians. Note there were no Muslims in Israel at this time.

Palestinians was first used in modern times to label the Jewish volunteers in WWI. Yaser Arafat seized it for his collection of eternal refugees in the 1960s and used it to describe an invented continuity between the ancient Canaanites and the modern Arabs who had moved into the area as the Jews bought up and improved the desolate areas of Judea and Samaria at the end of the 19th century.

The so-called Occupied Territory of Judea and Samaria was inhabited by Jews until 1948, when the King of Jordan drove all the Jews out. When Israel took it back at the end of the 1967 war it was actually Liberated.

The most important book to read on the Palestinians, the Arabs and the Nazis has, unfortunately, not yet been translated into English. Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers’ Halbmond und Hakenkreuz. Das “Dritte Reich”, die Araber und Palästina, translated Crescent Moon and Swastika: The Third Reich, the Arabs, and Palestine was published September, 2006.

Dr. Klaus-Michael Mallman, the author of many books on Germany and the Holocaust, is Privatdozent für Neuere Geschichte at the University of Essen. Martin Cuppers is a researcher at the Forschungsstelle Ludwigsburg, and has published an important book on the command staff and office of the Reichsfuhrer SS, the Head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler.

Here is a summary of the argument of the book, translated from a long summary in German:

The Nazis prepared to extend the Holocaust into Palestine and in preparation for doing so they infected the Arabs with their ideology, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, and the forces around Amin al-Husseini, in order to have allies.

“The Jew is the enemy and to kill him pleases Allah.” This statement, which is formulated a bit more rhetorically in the Charter of the Palestinian government party Hamas and which appears in publications of the Iranian state publishing house, and is daily broadcast by Hezbollah TV al-Manar to all world, actually originates neither from Islamic extremists nor from recent events. It was the common coin of Nazi radio broadcasts to the Arabs between 1939 and 1945 in order to win Arab hearts and minds to the German cause. Meanwhile German Middle East experts endeavored in Germany to convince the Nazi government of “the natural alliance” between National Socialism and Islam. Experts such as the former German Ambassador in Cairo, Eberhard von Stohrer, reported to Hitler in 1941 that “the Fuhrer already held an outstanding position among the Arabs because of his fight against the Jews.”

It continues

Despite the initial Nazi tolerance of Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine, the Nazi government eventually expanded their Holocaust plans to include the destruction of the Jews in the Near East. Studies undertaken by SS Einsatzgruppe [Special Taskforce] F already were listing Jewish dwellings in Palestine to be confiscated as accommodations for German troops once the Afrika Korps arrived in Palestine. Starting from the summer of 1942, an “SS Einsatz Gruppe Egypt” was established after the model of the mass-murder Einsatzgruppen active on the East Front, which had already murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews. The one established in Egypt was led by SS-Obersturmbannführer Walter Rauff and he had a whole staff with him, experienced in the murder of Jews, experts from the RSHA, the Head Office for Reich Reich Security. Their order: To continue “the destruction of the Jews begun in Europe with the energetic assistance of Arab collaborators” in the Near East.

According to Mallmann and Cuppers, the main Nazi ally locally was the Arab National Movement, and especially the Palestinian national movement, under the guidance of the exiled Amin al-Husseini Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and uncle of the later Palestinian president Yassir Arafat.

The mid to late 1930’s were marked by Arab efforts to curtail immigration and Jewish efforts to rescue as many Jews as possible from Hitler’s Europe. These years were also marked by escalating Muslim violence orchestrated by Husseini and other Muslim leaders. In 1936, Arab terrorism took on a new dimension. In the beginning the targets were once again defenseless Jewish civilians in hospitals, movie theatres, homes and stores. This was followed by strikes and shop closures, and then by the bombing of British offices. The Nazi regime in Germany and the Italian fascists supported the violence, sending “millions” to the Mufti. The SS, under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, provided both financial and logistical support for anti-Semitic pogroms in Palestine. Adolf Eichmann visited Husseini in Palestine and subsequently maintained regular contact with him. The support was mutual, as one Arab commentator put it:

“Feeling the whip of Jewish pressure and influence, the Arabs sympathize[d] with the Nazis and Fascists in their agony and trials at the hands of Jewish intrigues and international financial pressure.”

The Palestinians and their Arab allies were anything but neutral about the fate of European Jewry. The official leader of the Palestinians, Haj Amin al-Husseini, spent the war years in Berlin with Hitler, serving as a consultant on the Jewish question. Husseini famously posed with Hitler for a photograph that was proudly displayed in the homes of many Palestinians. He was taken on a tour of Auschwitz by Himmler and expressed support for the mass murder of European Jews. He also sought to “solve the problems of the Jewish element in Palestine and other Arab countries” by employing “the same method” being used “in the Axis countries.” He would not be satisfied with the Jewish residents of Palestine – – many of whom were descendants of Sephardic Jews who had lived there for hundreds, even thousands, of years – – remaining as a minority in a Muslim state. Like Hitler, he wanted to be rid of “every last Jew.” As Husseini wrote in his memoirs:

“Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: ‘The Jews are yours.'”

The Mufti was apparently planning to return to Palestine in the event of a German victory and to construct a death camp, modeled after Auschwitz, near Nablus. Husseini incited his pro-Nazi followers with the words “Arise, o sons of Arabia. Fight for your sacred rights. Slaughter Jews wherever you find them. Their spilled blood pleases Allah, our history and religion. That will save our honor.” In 1944, a German-Arab commando unit, under Husseini’s command, parachuted into Palestine and poisoned Tel Aviv’s wells.

Husseini also helped to inspire a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq and helped to organize thousands of Muslims in the Balkans into military units known as Handselar divisions which carried out atrocities against Yugoslav Jews, Serbs and Gypsies.

Around 820,000-850,000 Jews were either expelled from, or were otherwise forced to leave Arab countries after the 1948 War of Independence, a war started after the 5 Arab armies attacked the newly established State of Israel. Of these Jewish refugees, approximately 590,000-600,000 were absorbed into Israel, leaving behind their homes, businesses and possessions without receiving any compensation.

The War of Independence also produced some Arab refugees, totaling somewhere between 430,000-650,000. The vast majority of these refugees (approximately 68%) left without even seeing an Israeli soldier, but rather at the beckoning of the invading Arab armies, who were certain of a quick victory. [..]

So from my point of view, it is clear that the only just solution is for the Arab refugees to be absorbed into the Arab countries, rather than being kept in refugee camps as a pawn in the war against Israel. As for talk of compensation, Jewish refugees left behind assets in the Arab countries of greater worth than the Arab assets left behind in Israel, so if any side has a claim, it is us [Jews].

The citizens of Kyrgyzstan, a nominally Muslim country, have an interesting history with Islam: While the nomadic Kyrgyz haven’t really been introduced to the religion before the 18th century, Kyrgyzstani Uzbeks from the Ferghana Valley practice a more traditional form of Islam. During the Soviet era, religion was pushed to the sidelines of society, but Islam has seen some revival since Kyrgyzstan’s independence in 1991, again mostly in the southern rural parts of the country.

Last week, Kyrgyzstani bloggers were worried about the threat of Islamisation in their country. The debate was the result of an interdepartmental commission’s decision to allow Muslim women to wear hijabs for their passport photographs.

The decision of the commission was based on a claim that Islam prohibits women to uncover their heads and ears in front of unknown males. “We feel discomfort when we go through border control. The airport personnel demands us to take off our hijabs instead of introducing special rooms and having women personnel checking us”, Islamic representatives were quoted as saying.

War is raging in the island of Basilan, located in the southernmost part of the Philippines. An all-out war was recently declared by the government against the Abu Sayyaf bandit group accused of beheading 14 Marines last month. The military offensives have displaced thousands of families and imperiled the peace negotiations between the government and other Muslim rebel forces..

See what I mean about taking the side of the separatists against the legitimate government of the Philippines? The rest goes on like this, but is still a good overview of the ground.

Islam protects itself against conversions by putting apostates in prison or by killing them. But its obsession with conversion includes a series of privileges it claims for itself. So much so that in many Muslim countries, even those that are supposedly secular, the right to promote the Islamic faith is taken for granted and is not enshrined in law. Conversely, the right to promote any other religion is considered de facto and de jure unacceptable.

Islamic propaganda is part of the state’s mandate. In Egypt for example public institutions disseminate songs, prayers, movies and written material that praise Islam and denigrate Christianity. Inevitably this favours conversions to Islam. By contrast, Christian propaganda (tabshīr) is banned by law.

Recently in Algeria, a new law was approved that condemns anyone promoting the Christian faith and anyone who converts to Christianity. Of course, some might say that this kind of law is directed only at Protestant proselytising. True! But Muslims proselytise as well? Should the law not be the same for everyone?

And finally, Steve Verdon explores the links between Hillary Clinton, Norman Hsu, and Communist Chinese money going to a whole raft of Democrat candidates by way of Hong Kong and Mr. Hsu of the inscrutable business history.

Drudge has three linksto the newsabout Norman Hsu apparently a big time donor to Democratic candidates, and Hillary Clinton in particular. Hsu has donated over $600,000 to various candidates, but what is interesting is that his income appears to be a complete mystery. Further, there is an outstanding bench warrant for his arrest in a fraud case, and that Hsu has now been taken into custody and held on $2 million bond.

Hsu appeared in court accompanied by a lawyer and publicist, both of whom declined to say whether the New York apparel executive would immediately post bail. A warrant was issued for his arrest after he skipped the sentencing for a 1991 grand theft charge.

Publicist? This is sure looking like it will be interesting to watch. Needless to say all the candidates that Hsu has donated to, either directly, or through what appears to be proxies, have been scrambling to hand the money over to charities.

The Clinton campaign has said it will give to charity $23,000 that Mr. Hsu contributed, and yesterday representatives of Mr. Spitzer and Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, who received $50,000 from Mr. Hsu, said they would do the same. A spokesman for Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat who is a rival of Mrs. Clinton for the party’s presidential nomination, said Mr. Obama intended to give away $7,000 that Mr. Hsu contributed to his committees.